The Sir Edward Frankland BP Chair of Inorganic Chemistry

Prestigious Chair awarded to Professor Nick Long

The Department of Chemistry is very pleased to announce that Professor Nicholas J. Long, Professor of Applied Synthetic Chemistry and Head of Catalysis and Advanced Materials Research Section, in the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College London, has accepted the appointment of The Sir Edward Frankland BP Chair in Inorganic Chemistry with effect from 1 April 2011.

The Chair is one of the most prestigious positions in Chemistry around the world.  It was created for and first held by Professor Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson, FRS and Nobel Laureate, who held the position from 1955 to his retirement in 1988. Other encumbants of the Chair have been Professor Alan Cowley, FRS (1988-1989), Professor Mike Mingos, FRS (1992-1999) and Professor Vernon Gibson, FRS (2001-2008) who is now Chief Chemist at BP.

Nick Long gained BSc and PhD degrees from the Universities of Durham and Exeter respectively before moving to the University of Cambridge as the Adrian Research Fellow at Darwin College and Temporary Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry. He joined Imperial College in 1995 as a Governor’s Lecturer and was promoted to Professor of Applied Synthetic Chemistry in 2006.  His research expertise lies in transition metal coordination and organometallic chemistry and this has been recognised by the Royal Society of Chemistry Award in Organometallic Chemistry (2006) and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (2009). He wrote the acclaimed textbook ‘Metallocenes – An Introduction to Sandwich Compounds’ (Wiley, 1998) and has widespread interests in catalysis, materials science and more recently, molecular imaging and probe development, where he has forged a number of successful collaborations with colleagues in the Faculty of Medicine.